


Carry Up My Bones Away

by togina



Series: Grace in Thine Eyes [2]
Category: Justified
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Misery, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 16:03:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13930491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: How do you live without a heart?





	Carry Up My Bones Away

**Author's Note:**

> Just when you'd given up on this series! So, real life is insane, but I'm trying to work on this in my spare time, I promise, and thank you for all of you with your encouraging comments. Much like in the first part of this series, there is **no happy ending in this section**. This bridge between part one and part three shouldn't be longer than 20,000 words total, though I say that having gotten through 10,000 words and they've only made it to 23, so who knows.
> 
> There's mention of Boyd being at war--first in the Gulf, since they start shipping troops there in August, 1990. Then he's somewhere for the next two years, and in Somalia in 1993 (where they were doing peacekeeping for the UN relief effort, and [here's](https://history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm) a U.S. Army site about the skirmishes prior to the October deaths). I've tagged suicidal thoughts and depression because Boyd and Raylan are in pretty dark places, emotionally, but that's pretty canonical (feel free to come visit me on tumblr, toli-a, and ask me more about my views on that if you'd like!). This first part only has about three of the characters tagged, but they'll show up eventually, I promise!
> 
> Title from Genesis 50:25 and Exodus 13:19, both referencing Joseph telling Israel that when they leave Egypt they need to bring his bones with them. Exodus: “And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you.”

How do you live without a heart?

Boyd searched the county for the answer. He woke up in Helen’s spare room, the pillowcase damp and smudged with coal, only the faintest traces of Raylan’s scent lingering in the sheets. He called Johnny for a ride, and learned that the Crowder clan had been looking for him since yesterday morning when the mine had called about the collapse.

“Where were you, you fucker?” Johnny demanded, worried anger ringing down the line. _Why does Johnny always sound like he’s gargling rocks?_ Raylan had wondered once, years ago. If Boyd closed his eyes, he could see Raylan standing there with his shit-eating grin, flipping Johnny off from the dugout, leaning back against the fence, shouting over to Boyd. “You telling me the mine caved in and you decided to pass the day with Raylan’s aunt? You couldn’t be bothered to call your kin?”

Boyd pressed the receiver between his shoulder and his ear, wrapped his right hand around his bloodied left wrist and squeezed the gauze hard enough that pinpricks of blood appeared. Helen wouldn’t like that; she was running out of gauze, and Frances would need the first aid kit fully stocked once Arlo found out Raylan had left town.

“I was otherwise occupied,” he said softly, digging his fingertips into the divots of Raylan’s bite. “But I do apologize, Cousin, for causing you any undue concern.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not you die in the mines.” Johnny paused—probably to spit, his usual denouement to a display of manly callousness—and silence ticked across the line. Boyd’s head ached. His arm throbbed, and he’d twisted his leg running for their lives out of the mine. If his eyes itched, it was because he’d been blinded with the coal dust and debris flying through the air, couldn’t be bothered to wear the safety goggles that Briggs insisted –

Cullen Briggs had lectured them every shift, on their air quality monitors and their protective gear. _It’s impossible to keep you fuckers safe_ , he complained, clapping Boyd on the shoulder and smiling in the dark. _In my day, a pup listened to his elders. Now put on your damn hat and go blow up the mine_.

“Boyd? Boyd? Are you still there, asshole?”

Boyd shook his head, blinked away the image of Raylan’s thin face, eyes wide and mouth gaping open in a scream as Briggs shoved Boyd out of his grave. “Yeah. Sorry, Johnny. I’m here. I’ll walk down to the corner store, and you can pick me up there.”

He nearly packed the sheets, Raylan’s sheets, into his bag. He found the dusty, sweat and slick-stained jeans that Raylan had stripped out of to shower and buried them under his own clothes, shrugged off Helen’s suspicion by stating that the jeans were in fact his. Boyd didn’t tell her about the pair of socks he was wearing that he’d found tucked in the back of Raylan’s dresser drawer, or the library book next to the bed that he didn’t intend to return, where Raylan had lost interest and doodled a pair of spurs on page 32, a cowboy hat above the heading for chapter 3.

If Helen hadn’t been watching, Boyd might have collapsed in the driveway, might have let his knees fold and drop him onto the oil stain his truck had left, smash into the concrete and stay there until the sun went down or he could breathe.

But she was watching, so Boyd locked his knees and took a careful step forward, eased his weight down until he was sure his leg would hold. Then another step. And another, until he’d reached the road, following the path that Raylan’s taillights had cut down the hill.

Terrible, chicory coffee didn’t fill the hole in Boyd’s chest, or soothe the cramping twist in his guts. Raylan made terrible coffee, added more sugar than a man could stand and claimed he’d made it just how Boyd liked, grinned when Boyd suggested adding moonshine might help the taste. Boyd looked past the coffee counter and there was Raylan in high school, buying sunflower seeds and bubble gum for the game, distracting the cashier while Boyd nicked an entire box of cheap lighters and a keychain flashlight.

“You’re moving slower than Granny ever did,” Johnny informed him, watching Boyd lift himself limb by limb into the truck, every muscle feeling bruised down to the bone. “You blow the seam down on your fucking head?”

“I did not.” Boyd braced himself and pulled the door shut, felt it reverberate down his elbow and into the hollows of his chest. “Though I certainly contributed to the tragedy, as evidenced by my continuing existence on this mortal coil.”

Johnny lit a fresh cigarette and turned to frown at Boyd, baffled by what Boyd felt should be perfectly clear. “It weren’t hardly your mine, Boyd. Sure as hell was a tragedy, though. They’re saying five dead, three in the hospital. One of the guys was on your crew, I think, name of –”

“Cullen Briggs.” Boyd whispered it, but the name still resounded like the crack of stone in a seam. He thought of church when he was young, the echoing thud of the Bible falling shut, the pastor’s final _amen_. “Our foreman.” He reached a shaking hand out for Johnny’s cigarettes, strained his wrist to feel it burn where Raylan’s teeth had been. “I know that, Johnny. I was there.”

“Oh.” Johnny paused, abashed by the reminder that Boyd had lived the rocks and pitch and terror of Harlan’s morning news. “Well, they’re having the memorial service at the Baptist church downtown, tomorrow afternoon.”

Tomorrow afternoon. Boyd wondered if they’d exhumed the bodies, or if Myrtle Creek had been declared too unstable, rescuers unwilling to send live men down to hunt for ghosts. If Cullen Briggs’s grave would look like Raylan’s, a name carved deep into cold stone and nothing below the grass but earth.

“Cousin Johnny.” Boyd flipped open the lighter, held the flame for too long over the end of the cigarette and choked when he inhaled. “I am going to need to avail myself of your truck.”

“What?” Johnny clutched the wheel with both hands, hunched protectively toward the ancient dashboard. “What the hell do you need my truck for? Fuck.” He spat out the window, flipped his cigarette butt into the breeze and scowled at his side mirror. “You loaned yours to Givens again, didn’t you? I told you that Uncle Bo ain’t gonna let that ride. He sees Raylan cruising through town in your truck, he’s gonna fuck your boy up.”

Boyd dragged tobacco smoke into his lungs, held his breath until it burned. “He ain’t gonna do shit,” he told Johnny. Couldn’t seem to speak above a whisper, as if Raylan’s teeth had cut into his vocal cords and not the tendons of his wrist. Boyd turned away from Johnny, peered out the window and flinched as they drove past Gilliam’s ice cream shop. He could see Raylan standing behind the counter, if he looked, fifteen years old, with bones growing faster than his skin could stretch, an angry red zit on his chin and his eyes lit up with something neither of them would name every time Boyd dragged the Crowders in.

The library was half a block down the road, and there was Raylan leaning against the wall at seventeen, soaking up the sun, golden streaks in his hair and his nose red with sunburn, a cigarette hanging precariously from his bottom lip as he waited for Boyd.

Boyd pinched his wrist and stared fiercely at the scratches on Johnny’s dash where there weren’t any ghosts. “Bo can’t do shit,” he reiterated, at Johnny’s skeptical look. “Raylan’s gone.”

 

When Raylan had destroyed Dickie Bennett’s knee and subsequently walled himself into his room, Boyd had lasted two weeks before he began knocking down the door. This time, Boyd lasted two days. (Jesus had only spent two days in hell, and Boyd saw no reason to outlast the Son of God.)

The whole county was teeming with ghosts. The millpond had Raylan at fourteen, coughing up a sip of Uncle Cyrus’s moonshine and jury-rigging a rusty fishing pole. Raylan was waiting for Boyd up in Cumberland, eighteen years old and chalking a pool cue, hip canted and whiskey eyes sparkling when some man with a Bud Light and a beer gut offered to “show you runts how _men_ play pool.” Raylan was at the top of Clover Hill, and he was sprawled over a rock at the Forks, stiltedly narrating _Lonesome Dove_. He was on every backroad in the county, a boy with his uncle’s truck and a yearning for the horizon, dreaming of big cities and stadium lights.

Raylan was in the churchyard, when Alf Napier approached the lectern to eulogize Briggs and Boyd couldn’t bear to spend one more moment inside. Only Briggs’s youngest pup noticed him go. Emmalyn had been standing on the front row pew reserved for the grieving family, facing the wrong direction and waving at Boyd whenever she caught his eye. She had tried to sit with Boyd—smiled wide as soon as she saw him, flounced down the aisle to show off her fancy dress, too young to understand why her mama had been sobbing for days—but her mother had shuffled her along to the front, gripped her little hand tighter when she complained. Good, decent folks didn’t sit with Crowders. (Good, decent folks didn’t die for Crowders, not unless it was begging for their lives at the end of a Crowder’s gun. Boyd had repaid Briggs the only way he could, shoved the only person who mattered out of Harlan the way Briggs had shoved Boyd from the cut.)

Boyd left one child in the church and found another outside, a twelve-year-old pup in a stained white undershirt and cheap polyester slacks, blades of grass tangled in his light brown hair and a solemn look on his round, young face. He was sitting on Cullen Briggs’s newly carved headstone, kicking his heels into the _June, 1990_ on the end.

_I’m sorry for your loss_ , everyone had said, the summer Clary Crowder had died. They’d clasped Boyd’s hand briefly between their sweaty palms and moved on down the line, paying their respects to Bo. Raylan—who looked so small, sitting on Briggs’s gravestone, his skinny shoulders hunched nearly to his ears, grass stains on his elbows and a cowlick in his hair—hadn’t ever told Boyd he was sorry Boyd’s mama had died. Instead, he had taken Boyd’s hand and run them into town, loaded them with candy and moon pies and popcorn for the matinee. Raylan had taken Boyd’s hand, and he hadn’t once let go.

Maybe he would have held on forever, if Boyd hadn’t driven him away.

“You all right?” Johnny came up beside him, knocked into Boyd’s shoulder and offered him a lit cigarette. They were standing in front of Briggs’s grave, facing his headstone. No one else was there. “Ready to give me back my truck?”

Boyd rubbed his eyes and stared at the place where Raylan’s Sunday shoes had been. _June, 1990_. He sucked smoke into his lungs, and rotated his healing wrist. “Cousin Johnny, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot remain in Harlan County.”

It had never been Boyd who wanted to leave. Raylan had complained, hemmed in by the hills. It had made him uneasy, seeing his name written in stone, walking fields sown with the bones of his ancestors, past present and future carved, indelible, into slabs of coal.

Raylan had been right all along. There was too much history in Harlan, too many ghosts. Boyd couldn’t breathe without glancing up and finding Raylan less than a foot away, the sight shattering his sternum and exposing the hole where he’d cut out his heart and sent it away.

“Where the fuck are you going to go?” Johnny snapped, his arm a tense line where it brushed Boyd’s side. “And how the hell would you get there, no truck and apparently no money, though I know you made out well at the mines.”

“No one makes out well at the mines,” Boyd replied, placing the rest of Johnny’s cigarettes against Briggs’s headstone. Briggs had preferred cigars. Cigars, and bourbon, and five card stud. If Boyd ever came back to Harlan he would bring a full bottle and a deck of cards, play a few hands with Briggs’s ghost. “You either make it out, or you don’t.”

“You didn’t answer the goddamn question,” Johnny said, crossing his arms and scowling at Boyd. “You gonna call Givens, wherever he is, ask for a ride?”

Raylan was exactly where he’d always wanted to be, free of Harlan County and well on the way to the rest of his life. Free of everything that tied him down, free of Boyd’s biting, desperate grip.

“Well, no. I had hoped I might trouble you for a ride up to Hazard. I have heard tell there’s an establishment in those parts with similar fare to what you’ll find at Audrey’s but for a better price.”

Johnny’s scowl deepened. Church bells rang out behind them, and somewhere on a different block in a different year Raylan laughed at Boyd’s joke about ringing his bell, the peal of it ringing in Boyd’s ears.

“And you’re planning to work in a whorehouse?” Johnny wondered, his nose wrinkled in baffled disgust.

Briggs’s toddler ran pell-mell through the cemetery, dark hair curling out of her braids, grinning wide and giggling as she slammed into Boyd’s leg, begging him to pull a quarter out of her ear. Raylan leaned against her daddy’s gravestone, twelve years old and staring intently at Boyd, one hand curled over his ribs and the other flipping a shiny quarter into the air, telling Boyd to call it before it hit the ground.

“The whorehouse was for your benefit, Cousin, though I do intend to sign over my body in return for some excitement and decent pay, if that’s what you’re asking,” Boyd replied, scooping Emmalyn up and remembering at the last moment that he couldn’t snatch the quarter from Raylan’s small hand. “But I am speaking of a different sort of prostitution.” He found a penny and some lint in his pocket, flipped the former between his fingers and made Briggs’s daughter shriek with delight, her laughter chiming brightly through the cemetery, chasing the shades away. “I’m headed for the recruiting center.”

“You’re joining the Army?” Johnny sputtered, startling Briggs’s youngest pup. She hid her face in Boyd’s neck, dug her nose into the marks Raylan had left, bruises that had yet to fade. Boyd wanted to fold her into the chasm of his chest, her warmth and her laughter part of a world where Boyd hadn’t killed her daddy, where Raylan counted his winnings at the poker table and never put any thought to running away.

“I’m joining the Army,” Boyd affirmed, looked up from Emmalyn’s hair and saw Mrs. Briggs surrounded by her kin and coming toward the tombstone, coming to collect her daughter and leave Boyd hollowed out and surrounded by ghosts.

How do you live without a heart?

Boyd had searched every hill and valley for the answer, for a balm, and had unearthed nothing but old bones. You couldn’t survive without a heart. Not for long. But you could join the Army, and maybe they could kill you quick, take you somewhere with no ghosts and put a bullet where your heart had been.

* * *

119 was the only road out of Harlan. Raylan drove west until the road ended. He had made a left at the first light he came to, didn’t bother to check the signs; there was no point, when he couldn’t see anything through his watering eyes. The intersection was familiar, anyway: take 119 west until it hit 25, then turn right—or swerve right, if you were Boyd, fishtail the damn truck and nearly run them off into the trees—and head northwest for the interstate and up to Lexington.

They drove up every few weeks, for Raylan’s sups or Christmas gifts or a day on the town, the windows down and the radio cranked up, Boyd belting out the lyrics and Raylan playing air guitar. They took I-75 north to freedom, reading the road signs and imagining what it would be like in Cincinnati, 83 miles away.

Boyd would have been waiting for Raylan, in Cincinnati.

_Do you think they print the newspapers in Polish, Raylan? We’d have to learn it, I suppose, once we started working at the meatpacking plant._

_That’s_ Chicago _, you asshole, and it’s a book. Did you think I wouldn’t remember that?_

_Well, now, forgive my blunder on that count, friend, but I had reason to think you wouldn’t recollect it, seeing as you never read the book._

_I read the essay you put my name on, and that was more than I wanted to know. Think it’s really like that, up north? Everybody packed in like sardines?_

_I’d guess it ain’t all that different: poor folks never see the sunlight, whether they’re in a factory or down the shaft. Guess we’d trade stars for city lights, and dirt roads for buses, and folks would laugh when they heard us talk, like the tourists in Lexington do._

Raylan couldn’t go north. He couldn’t go east—couldn’t turn around and drive back through Harlan, could feel Boyd’s command weighing like iron chains around his bones. Even if he could, he wouldn’t. He’d already thrown himself at Boyd’s feet, bared his neck and begged for Boyd’s claim, and Boyd had turned him away. Raylan didn’t have anything else to offer Boyd, besides himself, and that hadn’t been enough to convince Boyd to come with him, or to make him stay.

North, where Boyd would be waiting in a city bus, where he’d linger in the accent Raylan couldn’t hide, like the soft strum of the banjo on the cassette that Raylan couldn’t force himself to eject. North and east, to DC maybe, where Raylan would see Boyd in every politician’s canny smile, hear his lyrical nonsense in every campaign speech and flinch anytime someone mentioned unions or clean energy or the EPA.

Raylan turned south, over the border and into Tennessee. Boyd’s cassette played four more times, both sides, before 25 ran into I-81, north or south, heads or tails, and Boyd was always the one who’d flipped the coin.

North was Kingsport, and Johnson City. He and Boyd had driven to Johnson City for the Fourth of July last year, no other reason than that they could, that they’d never been and had time and money to burn. Boyd had driven, and they’d nearly died six times on the way there, been pulled over twice and nearly arrested until Boyd explained away all his explosives as fireworks and not dynamite. They’d been in this truck. Sweaty and cruising through town, Boyd’s head thrown back with laughter when he should have been watching the road, the bag of hamburgers he’d bought for Raylan between them on the seat.

Raylan pointed Boyd’s truck toward Knoxville. He slammed the flat of his hand into the stereo he’d bought Boyd for Christmas—they’d ripped the old one out Christmas morning, shivering in Raylan’s shed, his mama bringing them hot coffee with bourbon and cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven, icing dripping off the edges and onto their hands—and ejected the tape so he wouldn’t hear another refrain of _And Am I Born to Die?_ , Boyd’s voice shivering down the words.

Boyd had never been to Knoxville. Raylan wouldn’t find him there: wouldn’t see him lounging against a streetlight waiting for Raylan to win the fight that had gotten them kicked out of the bar, wouldn’t hear his abrasive laughter roll down a city block like the first wave of an explosion, wouldn’t expect to sit beside him in the theater and share a coke.

Maybe one day, Raylan would sling his bags into the back of the truck and think of it as his. Maybe one day, he would go straight to the driver’s side inside of standing by the passenger door, waiting for a boy with a dangerous smile and dizzying tornado sky eyes.

* * *

_My Ferocious Little Wildcat,_

_We have arrived at the second week of training. It is July, and, as you would have forewarned me, near about two hundred degrees in the shade. Merle fainted during yesterday’s morning run._

Once Johnny had finished cursing the military, Boyd, and—for unsubstantiated reasons—Raylan Givens, he forced Boyd into the truck and drove him to Bo’s so that he could tattle to Boyd’s daddy about his plans.

Johnny had been disappointed to hear that Bo Crowder didn’t disapprove. In fact, it might have been the first time since Boyd was seventeen that he’d gotten his daddy’s nod. He’d been desperate for it, then, if not desperate enough to incite Raylan’s displeasure by agreeing to break knees. Now Bo’s approval settled around him like an oil slick, another bitter reminder that Boyd had done what his daddy wanted and driven Raylan away. (Raylan glowered at him from the Crowder front porch, sixteen and gangly, wearing Boyd’s Sunday shirt and drinking Uncle Cyrus’s hellfire moonshine straight from the jar.)

“Be good to have a Crowder in the Army,” Bo endorsed, leaning against the hood of his truck and cleaning his favorite gun. “Lots of military boys aching for a little kick.”

“Now Daddy,” Boyd replied, shading his eyes from the sun and refusing to glance back at the porch where sixteen-year-old Raylan Givens was passing judgment on his life. “You ain’t seriously expecting me to sell drugs to my future comrades in arms, are you?”

Bo lifted his head, raised an eyebrow at his son—took in Boyd’s clenched jaw, his whipcord body strung taut and turned away from the house—and looked over to the porch. Raylan spat at him, but Bo didn’t see. “No, son.” He leaned into the second word, lip curled as he took his eldest in and found him lacking. Boyd was missing his heart, but that couldn’t be what made his daddy shake his head: Crowders were never meant to have hearts at all. “I ain’t expecting _you_ to do jack shit for this family. You’ll be busy shooting Commies and making us proud.”

Boyd was never certain if Merle had followed him into the Army because Bo wanted a drug dealer on the base or because Bo wanted someone to keep an eye on his son. (Or maybe Merle was running from his daddy’s fists, fleeing Uncle Cyrus the same way Boyd was fleeing all of Harlan County, running from the ghosts.)

_The drill sergeant and I have yet to come to an understanding about our purpose here at camp, and therefore occasionally dispute the nature of the work to be done._

Boyd had done two hundred extra push-ups the day before yesterday, the sergeant’s overzealous response to Boyd’s suggestion that there was no reason they couldn’t practice standing in lines at 0430 while also holding coffee. Last night he’d been assigned two consecutive watches, so instead of sleeping from nine pm to four am—directly under Merle, who thrashed around so much the whole bunk shook—Boyd had stood watch from 2300 to 0300.

The joke was on the sergeant, though. Boyd hadn’t slept for a month, and he hadn’t slept nights for nearly a year. It was better to march pointlessly around the camp searching for fires than to close his eyes and see Raylan’s pale face contort in a soundless scream, the world tilted sideways when Briggs pushed Boyd clear of the death he’d deserved. (It was better to stay awake, counting the seconds between Merle’s arrhythmic snores, than to close his eyes and see Raylan’s face. _I ain’t leaving without you. If you want, if that’s what it takes, you can –_

_Fuck you, Boyd._ Fuck you.)

_I suppose it will not astound you, baby, if I confess to you that the food here does not meet your mama’s exacting standards. I have never yearned for anything in my life the way I long for her fried chicken and a slice of cherry pie._

After Boyd had successfully accrued too many punishments to inflict on the entire platoon, they’d assigned him to KP duty. Possibly because he’d compared the military’s “chow” to his Aunt Etta’s cooking. He’d peeled potatoes for hours, chopped carrots with arms that already ached from “dropping and giving twenty more.” That Sunday, after Merle had called Bo, Boyd had picked up the phone and dialed a number that wouldn’t ring through to a Crowder phone.

“Who’s this?” Helen had demanded, and Boyd could see her in her kitchen, tapping her cigarette ash into the sink, standing by the electric coffee pot where Raylan had stood a few weeks before, holding out a mug and smiling at Boyd. “Well?” she prompted, when Boyd rubbed a hand over his shorn hair and struggled to respond. “I ain’t got all day.”

“Miss Helen,” Boyd finally managed, grateful that Merle had already been escorted away from the phones. It wouldn’t do, for Bo Crowder to hear that Boyd got one five-minute call a week, and he’d wasted it on _Givens_ kin.

Helen might have gasped, but it was hard to tell, his ear pressed to the Army’s staticky phone. She paused, then blew a long stream of air into the receiver. Boyd could practically taste the smoke.

“He ain’t called.” Boyd ducked his head, tucked the receiver against his shoulder and turned away from the line of men waiting to phone their families, even though no one could possibly hear. He rubbed his hand over the healing scars on his wrist, blinked hard to keep his eyes clear. “We ain’t heard hide nor hair of that boy, but the cops ain’t been by either, so I assume he’s fine.”

“Good,” Boyd croaked, squeezing his wrist to feel the ache of Raylan’s teeth in his skin. He’d told the recruiters it was a dog bite. He’d said it was his own fault; and that, at least, was true. “That’s good.”

The line ticked off the seconds as they went by, the low hum and the quiet rhythm of Helen’s long, smoke-tinged exhalations and his own.

“One minute, Crowder!” the sergeant shouted, though Boyd knew he should have had at least two left.

“I’m – I’ve, well, I’ve got to be going,” he announced, speaking slow and stilted, English a foreign language in his mouth.

“What’s your address?” Helen asked, at the same time, then snorted like she could sense Boyd’s shock down the telephone wires, his gaping mouth telegraphed from Fort Knox into the Kentucky hills. “Not that I care, mind you, but Frannie’s been asking where you hared off to. Thought she might want to know.”

“Of course, Miss Helen. I would never have accused you of –”

“Crowder!”

Boyd reeled off his address with alacrity, wished Helen his best, and hung up the phone before the sergeant could cross the room. Of course, it didn’t stop the asshole from ordering Boyd to the ground, and then assigning him to clean up the latrines.

It was Merle, who scrubbed the latrines, but one nineteen-year-old grunt in uniform wasn’t any different than the next. Boyd had traded Merle latrine duty for his night watch. There was no reason to stay in his bunk, nights, when coal dust burned his closed eyes and Raylan’s shattered face lurked in his dreams.

 

The first package arrived a few days later, though Boyd wasn’t given access to it until Sunday, a cardboard box wrapped in the same brown paper Raylan had used to wrap Boyd’s Christmas gifts. In it was a tinfoil package of sugar cookies—Raylan had helped his mama make them, when he was little, would come to school sometimes still dusted in flour, colored sugar stuck to his cheek—two pairs of knitted socks, and a note.

Boyd bartered the cookies and the socks, folded the note into his pocket where no one could see, though it said little at all. _Boyd_ , in spindly cursive, Frances’s handwriting nothing like her brash, impatient son’s. _Your mama would have iced these cookies. Green, I believe, as it was her favorite color._

_You be a good boy now, Boyd Crowder, and make your mama proud._

Then, farther down the page, so faint that he might have missed it, if he hadn’t scanned every inch of the paper for words he wouldn’t find:

_Thank you_.

Boyd dumped the explosive powder out of a grenade, and stuffed it back in with the shredded note. He didn’t need Mrs. Givens’s thanks. He knew he’d done what was best. He could feel the ache of it every day, the mismatched pieces of himself that Raylan had held together left splintered and raw.

_I sure do miss your mama’s cherry pie._

Boyd finished the letter, balancing the flashlight on his lap and wishing for his headlamp, wishing that his hands were covered in coal and Raylan was beside him, never farther than a few yards away.

The grenades didn’t quite go off as planned, the next day, and the drill sergeant blamed Boyd. Which was foolishness. Why blame Boyd for mailing a letter to his omega—sending it off in gunpowder and fire, the only way he knew how—when he could be more effectively blamed for smuggling six cartons of cigarettes into the platoon?

Who could blame Boyd for anything, when everyone knew from the TV that an alpha never was right in the head, once his omega had gone?

* * *

_Baby,_

_Sgt. Henkel has threatened to begin offering live ammunition at the shooting range. He says it’s to improve our accuracy, but I am fairly confident that he anticipates finding some young, impressionable boy willing to put me down and out of his misery. Thus far, his plan has not met with any success, but not for lack of effort on the sergeant’s part._

_You will be pleased to learn that I have qualified for my marksmanship badge, three weeks before they serve us with the exam. I rendered Henkel speechless. I would have made all of the shots, but for the fact that we’re laying on our bellies and loaded down with gear. The Army seems to believe that shooting people ain’t the sort of thing you do with a Glock tucked into your belt, standing on your own two feet like a man._

Raylan had treated the old Colts like fine silver, or the fancy jewelry folks from their side of the holler would never own. It stood to reason that Boyd’s hands curled around the M-16 a little tighter than the other boys’, familiar with the press of cool, deadly metal against his palms. It stood to reason that he could break down, clean, and reassemble the rifle in record time—it was just like riding a bike, and Raylan had squawked louder than Henkel ever could, when Boyd didn’t immediately clean their guns—especially when he had the time, bartering favors in return for standing extra watches at night. (Henkel always wondered why the platoon didn’t turn on “that Crowder jackass.” Boyd’s mouth might force them into punishment push-ups, but his platoon slept better than any other one that had come through Fort Knox. Everyone slept, except for Boyd.)

Army targets were also far easier to hit than a streak of white paint on a distant tree, or a dove taking wing into the early morning sky. Surrounded by country boys, Boyd would have expected everyone to hit the targets after they’d adjusted to the heavy gear and shooting prone. It was a cakewalk, compared to shooting squirrels in the dark.

“Why the hell would you try to shoot a squirrel in the dark?” Michaels wondered, trying to reassemble his rifle without the firing pin.

Boyd shrugged. “Why the hell not?” he answered, and didn’t say that sometimes your best friend’s daddy threw his mate against the window hard enough to crack it and her ribs besides, and shooting squirrels was the only comfort to be found. Boyd rubbed his scarred wrist and didn’t say a word.

_After four weeks of peeling potatoes, I am also becoming quite proficient in the kitchen. Now, I know what you’re going to say, ~~R~~ my friend. This skill would have served the Crowder household well years ago, and saved us all from Aunt Betty’s biscuits and the resultant cracked teeth. But I was hardly going to put my name down for Home Economics, darling, not when I had you to finish all those cabinets and napkin holders for me in Shop._

Boyd hesitated over ‘darling’, wrote it quickly, and moved on, refusing to glance back at the word, to close his eyes and see Raylan’s scowl, the indulgent uptick of Raylan’s thin lips.

“Why do you burn all the letters?”

Boyd shoved the latest letter under his pillow, next to the lighter he’d tucked there to use when he’d finished writing.

“Ain’t you noticed, Michaels?” he asked, pinned down the pillow with his arm and strained to maintain a lazy sprawl, still fifteen minutes before they’d be rousted out of bed. “I have an especial fondness for things that burn.”

Dynamite. Coal. Raylan’s temper, the gasoline in his amber eyes.

Michaels seemed to take this as an invitation to converse, though Boyd had intended no such overtures. Michaels was from Chicago—a big, black kid like that should have had intimidation tactics that put a Crowder to shame, but Michaels had never fired a gun in his life, had joined the Army because it was a good foundation for a political career. His father was a lawyer, and his mom was a doctor for omegas. Merle had cackled at that, muttered something unflattering and elbowed Boyd, who was suddenly eighteen and standing in a clinic parking lot in Lexington and couldn’t move.

“Why don’t you send them, though?” Michaels wondered, apparently unsatisfied by Boyd’s explanation and oblivious to his cocked fist. Michaels still fumbled his rifle during drills; even if Boyd had been the pacifist Harlan folks thought he was, he could still take this boy down without losing his breath.

“Send them to whom?” Boyd gave up on ignoring Michaels. He rolled out of his bunk, stuffed the letter and the lighter into his pocket, crouched by the wall to wrestle off the vent and grab one of his contraband cigarettes. He tilted his head, indicating his plan to head outside, and Michaels followed.

Another side effect of standing so many night watches was knowing exactly where nobody would find an insolent recruit smoking in the dark. He didn’t offer Michaels a cigarette. Didn’t think about midnight cigarettes in the back of a truck, smoke and stars and the languid, easy drawl of a boy spinning out his dreams.

He’d been stupid to forget that Raylan’s dream had always been to get away.

“Send them to your mate,” Michaels whispered, answering the question Boyd had asked several minutes before, peering nervously into the trees, shoulders hunched and waiting for some drill sergeant to come by.

Boyd recoiled, nearly spat out his cigarette. Michaels jumped. He eyed Boyd the way a man eyed a rabid mutt, and stuttered out some senseless apology with both his hands raised. “I’m sorry – I mean, I wasn’t trying to – Can she not read?”

Raylan would have laughed uproariously at Michaels’s sincere belief that Boyd was mated to a Kentucky-bred, illiterate hick, smirked at the big-city boy and strung out his vowels till they sung, scratched his head and scuffed his boot into the dirt.

“And what, might I ask, makes you think I have a mate?”

Boyd took a long drag off his cigarette, stared unblinkingly at Michaels. The boy dipped his head, and Boyd blew smoke into his face.

“You have about five seconds in which to answer me. After which I’m afraid I will begin to take your silence as an offence.”

“Sorry. Uh, sorry, Crowder.” Michaels’s gaze dropped to Boyd’s hand hanging loosely at his side. For a moment Boyd thought it was because the kid had wised up enough to check for a left hook headed his way, then realized that Michaels was staring at his wrist. “It’s just, um, that ... Well, your omega bite is in a pretty obvious place, is all. I, um. My dad’s is on his chest, but you can’t see it unless he takes off his shirt. I thought, well, I mean, having it there, that you were –” Michaels coughed, muttered the last few words low and quick, the skittering of a hunted squirrel into the trees. “- proud of it.”

“Omegas don’t leave claims,” Boyd said immediately, lips pulled back in an snarl it took him a moment to swallow down, shoving his left hand into his pocket with the half-written letter and the lighter to send it on its way. Michaels blinked at him, uncomprehending, and Boyd shook his head.

Michaels was an idiot, big city boy with a daddy working in a law office and a mama whose family had made her a doctor even after she presented as a bitch. It explained why they’d teach him such nonsense, his mama and grandmamma and the distaff side before that, telling the kid it didn’t matter the designation, claiming was in his pedigree, one way for generations of powerless, dark-skinned omegas to pretend they could own the world.

And if Boyd closed his eyes, he wouldn’t see the world in flashes of white and summer sun, Raylan’s jaw clamped around Boyd’s wrist, his dull, omega teeth drilling through skin and sinew, carving his mark into Boyd’s bones.

“I don’t have a mate,” Boyd said, when Michaels continued to stare worriedly at him through the dark and the faint glow of the base lights. It was true, after all. It didn’t matter that Boyd sometimes finished a cigarette, smoke in his mouth and nicotine in his lungs and none of it enough to cover the taste of Raylan’s blood from an asphalt-torn cheek, from a bitten lip, from a nick at the knob of his spine.

Michaels put a hand to his mouth, eyes round. “Oh, shit,” he whispered, reached his other hand out to rest on Boyd’s shoulder and squeezed. “I didn’t realize, man. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have said anything, if I’d known she was dead.”

The megaphones blared wake-up call, covering the brittle laughter Boyd couldn’t contain, his shoulder shaking under Michaels’s friendly grip—the weight of a stranger’s sweaty hand, Boyd’s mama dead and his mate gone and everyone _so very sorry for your loss_.

“I’ve got things to do,” Boyd declared, shook off Michaels’s hand and walked in the opposite direction of their bunks and the mess hall. His fingers clenched on the letter in his pocket, balled it into his fist. He had a letter to burn, and only a few minutes before Henkel came searching for him, only a few minutes to swallow down the tang of Raylan’s blood, to shove down the throbbing in his wrist, the ache where his heart had been.

 

_My friend,_

_I thought they were having us run all the way back to Harlan, this morning, fifteen miles of punishment because some unknown soul figured out that the bushels of potatoes in the mess could be used to create a light show or two._

“Fire in the hole,” Boyd had murmured, before blowing up Sgt. Henkel’s favorite car, thought about Raylan’s grin every time he came out of the cut, hollering for folks to get clear. Military Police had overrun the base, after that, but Boyd was a Crowder, and Crowders had been evading the law since Virginia was a colony and Kentucky was nothing but wilderness beyond the line.

_By the end of it we looked worse than you assholes after your first practice of the season, you running slower than the tortoise and Johnny gasping out his last breaths._

Raylan wasn’t on the Army base, not the way he lingered on every street corner in Harlan. But that didn’t mean that Boyd couldn’t hear him in the pounding footfalls of a platoon—a championship baseball team—on their daily run, or see him in the plate of hamburgers Michaels piled high, Raylan’s indignant scowl the time Boyd had bought him the girls’ Happy Meal and propped the small Barbie doll up on his dash.

_The Army would suit you, I believe. We wear uniforms and run around in circles when someone tells us to. Though the only balls and bats are the ones in the locker room. There’s enough food to fill even your hollow leg, and yesterday they taught us to fire grenades._

And it was selfish, but Boyd was grateful that Raylan couldn’t join the Army, couldn’t sign up and fall in line when they finished training and were shipped off to die.

_I can’t remember the way Mama sounded, did I ever tell you that? I recall the things she said –_ wash your hands, sweetheart, no respectable girl will want an alpha coated in mud; be back by dark or the witches will snatch you up for their pot – _but when I imagine her speaking it’s your mama’s voice I hear. I remember her lipstick on my forehead, and I remember her face from photographs, but I don’t remember how she looked when she kissed me goodnight._

Mostly, it was Raylan’s voice in Boyd’s head, _what the hell do you think you’re doing, son?_ and _Boyd, you’re smarter than this_ or _You’re ten times the man your daddy hoped that you would be_ ; _don’t call me baby_ followed by _c’mere, asshole_ and a small, indulgent smile. It was Raylan’s face that Boyd saw every time he couldn’t manage to stay awake, Raylan the last time Boyd would ever see him, his pretty face clean from the shower, white with rage and shaking under the geas of Boyd’s command.

Boyd had fled Harlan to escape Raylan, and he should have been grateful for the distance, but Raylan’s ghost had followed him over the county line, bitter blood and _fuck you, Boyd_ , and the pink scars on Boyd’s wrist that weren’t a claim. They weren’t the parts of Raylan that Boyd wanted to remember. They weren’t the parts he was afraid to forget.

Boyd had joined the Army to have his absent heart shot out of him long before he had the chance to forget the way Raylan’s eyes sparkled when he kissed Boyd goodnight.

Seven weeks into boot camp, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Boyd could see his wishes about to come true. They’d ship out by the end of August, to a land and a desert where Raylan Givens had never been, to a place where men would be waiting to shoot them down. And Merle was terrified, and Michaels was terrified; and it was selfish, maybe, but Boyd was grateful all the same.

* * *

Raylan had been in Knoxville for nearly a year, before he had to move. Knoxville wasn’t so bad, Raylan supposed, for most folks. Most folks hadn’t been shattered like ribs in a collapsing mine, he imagined, before they came.

Knoxville was busy. Crowded. It smelled like car exhaust and alpha sweat, concrete and asphalt, cheap cologne and expensive perfume. Raylan had slept in the truck for a night—all he could take of it, the truck that had been Boyd’s, where Boyd had fucked Raylan through his first heat since fourteen in the bed, where Boyd had kissed Raylan for the first time in the cab—and then gone to the nearest diner to nurse a cup of coffee, had made the waiter laugh when he’d asked for a second mug and extra sugar, nearly kicked out to the stool next to him before remembering that he was the only there. He’d walked out later that morning with a roommate and a line on a job.

The job was cleaning toilets and running drinks at a bar that reeked of bleach and sex and piss, but that was okay. The roommate, Otis, was perpetually stoned and shitty at picking up after himself, but that was okay, too. He wasn’t the roommate Raylan had imagined, but the Raylan Givens who lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, made it his business never to imagine impossible things. He would have made it his business never to think of anything at all, if he could have, if he didn’t wake up some nights with his jaw spasming and the sheets in a sweaty knot around his legs, hours spent chasing shadows and biting at air.

Raylan never had been enough for Arlo. Never had Frances bring him along when she ran. It stood to reason, that he wouldn’t be enough to make even the shadows stay.

Otis found Raylan’s sups when he went through Raylan’s room—looking for pot, Raylan suspected, and too stupid to think the sups were anything but the acne medication Raylan told him they were, but it was enough to get Raylan to move his money and Helen’s money and …the other money out of his mattress and into a bank. Banks were different in cities. Bigger, for one thing. Quieter. Run by alphas in New York or D.C. or London, and not by Maclaren kin.

He only came in with a little cash at a time, didn’t want the primped and fluffed omega teller to call the cops on the no-account boy with boxes of dirty money in his hands. It totaled up to more money than Raylan suspected Arlo had ever managed to wring out of someone’s broken knees. Raylan took the bank slip, put it in his wallet, and went to work. What good was it, having all that money and no one beside him to –

Raylan shook his head. He didn’t need the money, that was all. He’d gotten out of Harlan for free, the only price five fingerprint bruises around his wrist and a pickaxe shiver through his bones whenever he thought about the county where he’d been born.

He didn’t need the money, and he didn’t have any plans, neither. Raylan went to work in the morning, cleaned out the toilets from the night before, stocked the bar and poured himself a bottle of bourbon to pass the time.

He went home to bed, after. Woke up with his head aching and his jaw aching and a sharp pain at the base of his neck, right at the first knot of his spine. Went to the diner for free coffee and whatever Otis could scrounge up for him. Sat in a booth and watched Knoxville walk by. Went to work and watched them drink and fuck and shit. Went home to bed.

Months went by. The rest of Raylan’s life would go by just like this, he thought, scrubbing out a toilet and grateful that the sups dampened his ability to scent. Girls came on to him sometimes, omegas and betas and the occasional alpha, and Raylan scrubbed the toilets harder the next day and hoped he smelled too noisome for them to do it again. He took his sups and didn’t touch his cock except to piss, didn’t close his eyes and imagine things that could have been. His cock stayed soft and his asshole stayed dry, and eventually the girls stayed away.

And there it was. The rest of Raylan’s life, in a bathroom in a dive bar in Tennessee.

Of course, then it turned out that Knoxville, Tennessee wasn’t so far from Harlan County after all.

Raylan was sitting at the diner and squinting out the window, through his sandpapered eyeballs and into the sharp, painful light of the morning sun, watching folks meander down the street, the rhythm of their footsteps matched to the pounding in his skull. His manager had started charging him for the bourbon.

And maybe thinking of last night’s bourbon was enough to call the devil out of Harlan and into Tennessee, because Raylan tilted his head and peered out through slitted lids, and watched Bo Crowder climb out of a shiny red truck.

Raylan choked on his coffee. The hallucination was standing twenty feet away from a much older, faded red truck—a truck Bo would surely recognize, if he turned his head and stared over the foreign compact cars and saw a truck that, up until ten months ago, had spent every night in his drive.

Bo didn’t turn, though. He slammed the truck door and rubbed his sweaty hands on his jeans and grinned at the man who showed up beside him, shook his hand. Hot Rod Dunham. Of course. Hot Rod had been in the Givens house a time or three, though his interests seemed to align more with the Bennetts than with Arlo or even Bo.

Bo leaned against his bright red truck and didn’t look anything like his oldest son: wide where his son was narrow, blunt where his son was sharp, his fingers thick and clumsy, his laugh rolling and not blown up like coal shards and dynamite, not a single thing about him that could possibly make a man think of Boyd.

Raylan’s bones shook. He skipped work that night, pulled his baseball cap low and crept out to his loaded truck; he was over the border into Carolina before his manager called to ask Otis where the hell Raylan was, Otis swinging open the bedroom door to an empty room.

Raylan had never been to South Carolina. He pulled onto I-26 South without even flipping a coin, mind blank and nobody’s emo music in the cassette player, no shadows in the dark, nothing but the road and Raylan’s shaking hands.

* * *

The first time it happened, summer 1993, _The Fugitive_ had just opened in Columbia, South Carolina. (Well, now, that ain’t quite true. The first time it happened had passed by without anyone noticing, two years back, when the heat in Otis’s shitty apartment had given out, and Raylan had gone to work and drunk more than he ate, nothing different there; and came down with a flu that laid him flat, fever hallucinations and copious vomiting all night into the toilet, too sick to make it downstairs and buy medicine from the corner store. Boyd had blamed the night he spent shivering and puking army rations on food poisoning, on running ten miles that day in full fatigues. He never wondered why he’d been fine with terrible MREs and a long run in the desert the week before.)

Raylan had gone on his own. He was dating Shaleen, then, and Shaleen liked movies in French that had sex and cigarettes and omegas fucking betas and then talking the whole thing to death while Raylan picked popcorn shells out of his teeth and tried not to fall asleep in the theater. He’d met Shaleen in English class, because Raylan had gotten to Columbia and walked into a diner and didn’t ask for a second mug, didn’t reach out for a shadow that wasn’t there. He’d gotten to Columbia and pulled out the cash for his breakfast and pulled out the bank slip, spent an hour rubbing his fingers over the total in his savings account, trying not to think of anything that might make his bones shake with command. All the things he was trying not to think of burned in his chest like the coffee going down his throat, all the dreams he’d shared, all the things he had never wanted to do alone.

Then he’d gotten up, and gone to find the local college, to see if—despite what Raylan’s daddy had promised—they’d be willing to take Raylan Givens without seeing his swing or measuring the strength of his throwing arm.

The beta girl at registration had asked him to a campus party that night. Raylan had run a hand through his hair, rubbed his fingers over the ache at the base of his neck, and said yes.

The girl hadn’t lasted. Neither had the next dozen, but Raylan didn’t mind, took them out where they wanted to go, let them show him off on their arms, then took them home and fucked them open, kept his asshole screwed shut and thought Columbia’s sups must have been better than Lexington’s, because he didn’t produce a whiff of slick.

Shaleen had only agreed to date Raylan because she thought he was an alpha claiming to be a beta, and she was part of some “Beta Society for Good” group that advocated that sort of thing. Raylan didn’t pay much attention; he had long years of experience sitting behind the wheel of a truck and pretending to listen to someone’s politics. He’d managed to come out of … well, if he knew what the EPA was, that was only because it was _Raylan’s_ politics, and not because he’d heard tell of it somewhere before.

He expected that she stayed because the sex was good, and because she handed out more flyers when Raylan agreed to help her man the booth. But he knew better than to take her to _The Fugitive_ , one of those films that were “Hollywood jacking off someone else’s alpha prick.” _Nothing we both haven’t done before_ , Raylan thought, but the thought ached, so he bit his tongue and went to the theater on his own.

He came home that night, back to his crappy apartment with Marcus, the weird roommate who never bathed, with the thin walls and the busted AC unit, and went to his underwear drawer. He reached in the back and pulled out the six-shooter he’d hidden there a year ago, spun the cylinder and rubbed his thumb over the _RG_ engraved on the grip. _Let’s play Cowboys and Indians_ , one little boy had told another, running for the woodshed and running back to creep into Mrs. Crowder’s kitchen when the cookies were done. _Want to play cowboys?_ Boyd had offered, two Harlan boys with nothing but time, the same way he suggested going dove hunting at night when the world fell in.

Samuel Gerard was a U.S. Marshal. Like Matt Dillon. Like the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. Gunslingers. _Cowboys_. Raylan was still holding the gun, his thumb pressed to the letters of his name, when he fell asleep.

 

The first time it happened—the first time anyone recalled—Boyd was in Somalia. Soldiers were there to aid the relief efforts, the U.S. Government and the United Nations declaimed, but Boyd had spent his time there doing more dressing up to intimidate the local warlord (and doing time in the stockade, because it was never a good idea to leave Boyd with an abundance of explosives and boredom) than providing relief.

Merle complained about the people. About the ugly omegas. About the dust, and the heat, and the MREs. Michaels said dumb things about improving their character, which was proof that three years in the Army hadn’t improved Michaels’s intelligence one iota. Three years, and Boyd’s worst injury was when he’d scalded his hand boiling potatoes. Boyd had joined the Army to get shot in the chest, and all it had done was slap the back of his hand like a bitch. The Army wasn’t half as dangerous as the advertisements had promised, wasn’t a tenth as dangerous as the mines.

But Raylan had insisted that Boyd would never go back to the mines, and Boyd had felt the truth of it in the bones of his scarred wrist, knew that even if he tried he’d be crushed under the weight of something heavier than stone.

They were on patrol, as usual. Piled into the armored carrier and stinking with sweat, too many alphas and Merle packed into one car. A Somali kid ran up to ask for chocolate, and Boyd had to jam his boot heel into Merle’s calf to keep his cousin from shooting the pup.

The kid distracted them. Michaels went digging in his fatigues for chocolate and Merle cursed at the kid and Jenner, the driver, cursed at Merle, and it was only Boyd who caught the flash of a pale khameez in the dark, who saw something glint in the road ahead of them.

It was Boyd who reached for the oxygen monitor he didn’t carry, who meant to shout for Jenner to stop and had only opened his mouth when the ground shuddered beneath them, when the desert split and the mountain fell and the Emulex sent them spinning out of the cut, into the air. Merle’s scream cut off quick, buffeted into silence by the thunderous nothingness of the explosion. Boyd watched Jenner’s face blacken, tumbled backwards or upside down and saw a familiar scar—Merle couldn’t fish for shit, always caught the hook in his own damn hand—on a hand on an arm spinning on its own through the air.

Then the mine collapsed, the fire came, and Boyd knew that this was it, this was the shot he’d been hankering for. He closed his eyes.

Raylan was waiting for him, of course, hard hat askew, pale face and wide eyes, mouth open on Boyd’s name and hands outstretched. Boyd should have known it wouldn’t be so easy to leave. He never could escape the ghosts.

 

“Get up! Get _up_ , goddammit!”

Raylan’s shout brought Marcus running into his room at 2am, holding his wine bottle candle holder like a weapon and prepared for his first fight. He found Raylan clutching his side, twisting out of his sheets, teeth bared and eyes clenched shut.

“You can _walk_ , you fucker! Walk. C’mon, dammit. Fuck. _Move_! You _can_ move, Boyd. You can you can you can you _can_.”

 

“Who’s Boyd?” Marcus wondered, the next morning, hours after Raylan had screamed himself hoarse, trying to staunch a wound in his side that wasn’t there.

Raylan poured himself a cup of coffee, drank it black and winced as it hit his throat, swallowed the whole mug down. “Nobody,” he rasped, rubbing his neck and trying not to think of blood, or coal dust that looked like sand, coveralls patterned like fatigues and a bomb that could have brought down a mine, all the things he wasn’t thinking sitting like a lead slug in his gut, ripping him open and laying him low.

“Sure sounded like somebody important,” Marcus disagreed mildly, waxing his dreds. “You spent a hell of a long time screaming for him to move.” Raylan had a vague recollection of his roommate standing in his doorway, holding a wine bottle like a baseball bat. “Was he standing in your way?”

Raylan shook his head. “’T’s nobody,” he repeated, didn’t think about running his fingers over pale skin, fingertips digging into a scarred wrist to make sure the pulse was still there. “Must have been a bad dream. That’s all.”

That’s all it could have been. It wouldn’t be the first time Raylan had dreamed Boyd blown to pieces. His bones ached, at the thought, and that was familiar, too, another symptom of the nightmare he must have had. It feeling real didn’t make it any different from the rest. Raylan had enough bad dreams to know.

 

Boyd woke up in an Army hospital in Mogadishu, arm stretched out toward someone who wasn’t there, tongue tripping over Raylan’s name. There was an IV running into his left hand. That explained it, then. They must have given him the good drugs, and he had hallucinated Raylan Givens in Somalia, squatting above Boyd Crowder and shouting at him to get up and _move, goddammit, Boyd,_ move! _You can you can you can you –_

It was the drugs, that was all. Boyd had gotten to his feet all on his own, had stumbled out of the fire and away without any help from a lanky, brown-haired boy. Raylan had looked different than Boyd normally imagined him. His hair was longer, practically over his ears, and his shoulders had widened. It made him look like a hippie. It made him look like the man Boyd would never see.

_You can you can you can you can_. Boyd put his fingers over the scars on his wrist, rested them in the same places his hallucination had, pressed down until it ached despite the drugs, Raylan’s thin face behind his eyelids, Raylan’s ornery, gravelly, beloved voice echoing in Boyd’s ears.


End file.
